Beirut and new Tono single.

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of opening for Beirut with Tono and the Finance Company. It was amazing getting to perform at the beautiful Wellington Opera House, and the legendary Auckland Powerstation.

Initially I wasn't into Beirut's music, but they're absolute monsters live, and really delivered the songs beautifully.

Many thanks to Matt Crawley, who organised the whole thing.

A crappy photo I took on my camera. There's some decent photos of us on facebook.

Also in other news, Tono's released the first single, "Skinny Jeans" off the new album. Check it out here. I hope y'all like it.

Now that's a tour

Check out the tour schedule for Alizarin Lizard. It's freakin' massive! Good work fellas!

The last dance.

When I first moved to Auckland I initially had real trouble finding work, and as a result quickly became desperately broke. To cut a long story short, I ended up DJing at primary and intermediate school discos. I’ve been doing it ever since about May last year, and hopefully I’ve done my last one for quite a while.

Here are a few images and a video that should give an idea of what it was like.

A note from my boss, which he'd left for me in one of his CD wallets.

My view at the beginning of a disco.

DJing for a junior school. It's true that the music taste gets worse as they get older. I can actually get away with playing 60's rock n roll with young ones.

Even Santa likes to dance.

Mid disco at an intermediate school. Notice how light it is outside.

Oh lordy this is the weirdest job I've ever done.

Simon Comber Tour

Admittedly a little late, but here are a few snaps from a wee mini-tour I went on drumming for Simon Comber last month. He'd just released his (really rather good) EP. You can check it out here.

Tabac, Auckland.

My view at The Bay Bar in Acacia Bay, Taupo. Bryan from Bitter FM put this one for us. He's a really top dude, and his station is fantastic.

Space Monster, Wanganui. This has to be one of the coolest DIY venues I've ever been to.

Clever boys

T54 have to be one of my favourite NZ bands. They've just gone and released a video for their scorcher of a song "Julie K." They're on tour next week, and I'm definitely going to their Auckland show. While you're at it, buy their EP Drone Attacks - it was recorded by Dale Cotton, and it seriously rules.

Boom tang.

The Beast is unleashed

I'm not sure totally when Proton Beast released the little mini EP, it might have been yesterday when Westley put the songs on bandcamp, or today, when I linked to it on Facebook. Either way, Proton Beast's debut digital mini-EP has been "released".

Readers, you probably don't even know what I'm babbling about, let me backtrack a little.

At the start of last year I'd just moved to a new city, was broke, and wasn't involved in any music. I posted an ad on gumtree mentioning I was a drummer keen to work on interesting musical projects, but was disappointed with the feedback I was getting. It seemed the only people making music in Auckland in early 2010 were pairs of bedroom guitarists wanting to get their "punk/funk/radiohead/red hot chilli peppers" project out gigging.

So I deleted the old ad and put uploaded a new one, basically telling those people to not bother contacting me, and quoted a bunch of wanky bands I was into. Only one person ever replied, Westley Holdsworth. He emailed me, mentioning that he too was a fan of Sunn O))) and Liars, and that we should meet up for a beer.

9 months, several gallons of homebrew, and a handful of trips to Spicy House later, David Good was recording our fancy new two-piece band at the University of Auckland studio. Not a bad facility overall: Nice room, reasonable mic selection, oddball digital desk, kinda crap monitors. Most importantly, free! Dave was pretty awesome for a dude new to recording, and was patient with our fluffing around.

Later I mixed the tracks at The Lab, with Tom Healy helping out. It was mixed entirely with hardware - no plugins were used at all. Tom was super helpful, both with showing me how to fly the Neve, giving great feedback, and bringing some pretty crazy ideas to the table.

So anyway, there you go, that's the guts of the band/mini-EP.

Brain dump over.

Roofing Specialists Auckland Ltd

Okay so my flat had it's roof fixed by these guys a few weeks ago. Low and behold, about 3 days after they'd finished the job, my flat got burgled. The perpetrators only took our laptops, and it seemed like they knew exactly what they were looking for. When we went to the police, they said that it probably was the roofers, but there wasn't anything they could do about it.

This isn't the sort of stuff I really like posting on my blog, but for whatever reason, things I write on here come up near the top of the google search engine, and I don't want other people to get ripped off by these guys.

Which actually brings me to the real point of my post. What other tools are there out there on the net to name and shame these guys? They're not listed on google maps, so I can't write a review there (I don't think). However after checking out the NZ Companies website, I found the company is based at 199 Balmoral Road, Mount Eden, Auckland.

So yeah, any techie geeks out there know of any more good ways to get the word out?

Oh yeah, everyone out there, install Prey on your computer. It's an amazing (and free) anti-theft device.